


From the Garden of Gods

by Sythe



Category: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale, Naruto
Genre: Apocalypse Maiden, F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-13
Updated: 2016-02-25
Packaged: 2018-04-20 13:54:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4789703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sythe/pseuds/Sythe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a barren land incapable of sustaining life, a Miko, whose most basic and most principal of powers is to give and nurture life, must seem divine in nature. It's not simple Mokuton, said Sunagakure village eldders, Mokuton only affects wood and cannot give life to dead crops. It definitely does not resurrect a village on the brink of historic financial depression either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Seed and Desert

Disclaimer: I do not own anything Inuyasha or Naruto related. The only thing I own is the plot.

 

**Chapter 1: Seed and Desert**

_‘A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and immediately they sprang up, since they had no depth of soil. Others fell among the thorns, and the thorns came up and choked them out. And others fell on the good soil and yielded a crop, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty.’_

\- Matthew -

 

* * *

 

The first time Kagome Higurashi awoke in the new world, her throat was parched dry, her nose burned, and her skin came to the point where they almost crackled under the full weight of the desert sun. From her eyes, still dazed, she saw nothing but endless sand dunes and the white glare of incoming heat mirage. From her ears, she heard nothing but the howling wind playing without pause on the backdrop of an infinite silence, the likes of which she was sure could only be found in the depths of the earth and far into the deep wilderness where no man dared tread.  

 

In the first five seconds of their meeting, face to face, this new nameless world had already shown her how harsh it could be, and how tough it would be, and Kagome—for she was never one to complain nor lament about her usually less than stellar state of affairs—in reply simply got up… no… struggled and crawled because at that point her body was already too dehydrated and she herself had grown too weak to actually sit up, stand, and walk away and out of the desert.

 

The sand was under her, in the space between her fingers, sprinkled on her browning skin and falling in the folds of her clothes and shoes, hot from the sun and uncomfortable in their countless grains. Eventually, after some fumbling and an infinite amount of struggling, she managed to reach her backpack. Her water bottle was in the side mesh pocket and from it, her strength came back in cool rivulets of water down her throat, inside and out, into her shirt, dampening her skin.

 

She saw droplets of water on the sand, being sucked into the bottomless desert sea, and with the first of her returning courage, yanked her mouth away from the bottle and stoppered it tight. Her throat burned and cried out for more—water, life, sustenance, relief and escape from this burning hell on earth—but she put her foot down.

 

She would need to save up the little that remained, sloshing wonderfully inside the clear plastic Camelbak bottle, for the trek ahead. Licking her dry and gradually chapping lips, she fumbled some more with the zippers on the backpack and from them withdrew a jacket, her school baseball cap, and a spare of Sango’s facemask. She wet the facemask with a cupped handful of water, then she put them on, shouldered her backpack, and, with great difficulty, crawled slowly away from the clear open space of blasting sun and towards a rock jutting in the distance. In its shade, she found temporary relief from the heat, and there she slept fitfully until the sun set; the heat bleeding out from the sandy ground and the cold of desert night starting to creep along her skin. Then and only then did she fully wake up, eat her first bite of tasteless granola bar in this world, and start to find her way out of the desert.

 

It was never going to be easy, this she knew. And while she had some preparation from the countless wilderness survival books she had gobbled up for her trek across Feudal Japan, surviving and escaping a desert terrain—whether she had knowledge of it or not—was never a hundred percent guaranteed with success.

 

She walked during the night and rested in the shade during the day. She forced herself to walk slowly, conserving her strength and her will for the long days ahead. She ate slowly and in little bites, never allowing herself to progress to complete fullness. It took water, a lot of water, for the body to process food. A full stomach meant that her limited water supply would last her nowhere near as long they would if she forced herself to go regularly hungry.

 

So she ate, but just enough to fuel the body, never enough so that the gnawing of her stomach completely disappeared and took with it precious water that could be used to sustain her for longer. A fine balance game.

 

Her water bottle lasted for a full two days, after which she started digging solar stills around her shade in the day to harvest the moisture from the earth and from her own piss.

 

Gross, and not something the old Kagome would do without giving up some grouses and stressing out over hours better spent on surviving, but she wanted to live, and the business of living in a world where creature comforts of modernity could never reach was usually an unsavory business.

 

In the day, when the sun wasn’t frying anything outside of shade or not made of stone, dirt, and sand, she foraged along the path of dried up riverbeds, adding moss and weeds and small burnt leaves to her stock of dried jerkies, cup ramen (which came near the point of being useless here because while she could eat them raw, their high sodium content was a huge waste of water from her body), and granola bars.

 

She walked North, leaving little stone cairns behind in the dirt and the sand to mark where she had been, because North was where the wind came from and where the streaks left behind by dried up waterbeds pointed to. North, where there probably was still water, somewhere in the heights, up in the stone plateaus where the earth hadn’t been rendered infertile.

 

The days were long and the nights longer, and in between surviving, she found her thoughts wandering back to her friends, to the world and family she left behind. There were no tears to shed. She was long past what happened and even in the case that the pain proved too much, tears were a terrible waste of the increasingly shrinking amount of water inside of her and her water bottle. So she trudged on, days, nights.    

 

Her light schoolgirl uniform and added track pants were a terrible match for the terrain and the weather but it was at least durable. She tried to preserve the shoes as best she could, not wanting to have to trek through the scorching by day and freezing by night vast expanse of lifeless sand, dirt and rock on nothing but bare feet, but they probably wouldn’t last forever.

 

She stopped counting the days. The heat was giving her intense headaches and her lips dried to the point of bleeding at times. One day a sandstorm came without warning—or maybe it did come with warning but she was too blind, deaf, and ignorant to see it coming. She managed to survive, just barely, swimming in the waves of sand with only gulps of air in her lungs, abandoning her heavy backpack to fall into the fathomless depths of the desert. There went the stuffs she so painstakingly took with her but she had made do on less.

 

She cut her hair till they were up to her ears and just about covered her neck from daylight. They were getting in the way and she was starting to think about the nutritions that went to nurturing them instead of keeping her alive and moving. Maybe that was grasping for straws, but who knew? She was getting to the point where sand bugs made for a scrumptious meal.

 

Then the demons of the past started haunting the nights. The unbearable loneliness and infinite silence was getting to her, she knew. The old Kagome would have withered. The old Kagome would rather go back to her friends even if she had to die to do so. This Kagome wanted to live… not for herself, no, even now she wasn’t someone who could truly and fully live just for herself, but simply because she still had something to do. Something that could never be left unfinished.

 

A promise to keep. She had to live. Live and keep her words.

 

Then one morning they appeared on the horizon of her increasingly blurring vision, the unclear but definite shapes of man-made constructs in the distance.

 

Crouching there, because she no longer had the strength to stand upright, on the stone ledge and looking at the vague shapes in the distance—that was her first time seeing the Village Hidden by Sand. She cried. Soaring joy and a bone deep sadness welling in her chest. It could have ended there in the heart of this yet nameless desert, but in the end, Kagome Higurashi yet lived. The story that started when she was a fifteen-year-old teen girl at the mouth of a long abandoned well was not yet over. No. Not by a long shot.  

 

In hindsight, it was stepping from one life-threatening desert into another, only they were life threatening in different ways, but then again, what difference did it make?

 

* * *

 

 

They threw her out once they were done.

 

In the stories and on TV, the lost protagonists were always taken in, clothed, fed, and cared for by the good village folks. How many books and video games had she played in which her character started out as the wandering bum in some scenic small name villages with people way too charitable to be real? Whoever heard of games or books or movies where it ended right in the first act/episode/tutorial level because the hero starved to death with zero penny in her torn and patched pockets… or thrown into the brig and left to rot?

 

Apparently it was so in real life. Apparently it was so if the village in question was by all means a military outpost, whose access was limited to only those with the proper papers and passes; its denizens traversing in a world where farfetched espionage schemes were an everyday affair. Apparently it was so if the heroine—in this case—wandered in through the gate looking like a lunatic with zero documentation on her body and did not even speak the local language.

 

Of course they took her in at first, at the gate where she pathetically dragged herself to them on all fours. Deep in the desert as they were, they had had enough of their own people—children who didn’t know better, elderlies with diminishing senses, or the mentally deficient—getting lost out in the sands only to come wandering back months later, to know gentleness and leniency was called for when a little no-name waif wrapped in week-old dirt and grime layers came crawling.

 

They put her in a closed-off ward in the hospital, cleaned her up and nursed her until she could talk… really talk and not just make unintelligible noises with the back of her tattered throat (the heat destroyed them on the second week, and afterwards, Kagome sometimes screamed to ward off the night demons). They checked her face and her fingerprints, took her blood and hair for testing. Once they were sure she wasn’t any of their lost denizens that had gotten back home by sheer feats of tenacity and luck, they threw her into the interrogation chamber where their soldiers strapped her to an iron chair and their interrogators spent countless hours growling foreign threats to her face. And when even that couldn’t yield anything new out of this obviously foreign crazy girl...

 

… they threw her out.

 

On the streets, in the night. They unlocked her shackles and escorted her through several stairs and way too many gates for her frazzled mind to remember until she was standing on this side of the door leading out to the village street. They gave her a bag, cast pitying looks—usually reserved for the suicidal or the mentally retarded—at her, pushed her out the door, and closed it.

 

She stood there in the streets, in nothing but her offwhite makeshift detention center garb, freezing in the cold desert night, for maybe a full minute as her mind came to terms.

 

She was lost, again, not even in time as she had done so years ago, but in a completely different world. Lost and alone and tethered to this strange place with nothing but the strength of a promise. She may not be able to understand the language nor the people, but she had seen how different their world was—how different the people. She felt a quiver starting from her heart, spreading out to her limbs, to her throat, to her eyes, threatening to spill and break her already in tatters mind.

 

It would be very easy to end it all. She reminded herself. But suicide was, beyond anything else, an act of selfishness and barred from her by the strength of a promise. So she heaved the bag to her shoulder and started walking aimlessly into the night.

 

* * *

 

The next several weeks were… difficult to remember. A blur in her mind. A trance during which she could hardly recall the details of.

 

Blue skies. Sand the color of burnt yellow. The wind—the moaning, howling, sometimes growling wind. Wind that filled in every second of maddening silence inside her head. Hours spent wandering aimlessly along the village labyrinthine paths. The scent of human sweat, sun and dirt, fetid and heady in the ever present heat. The sounds, the sighs, the chirrups of a hundred words in foreign tongue. The cool breath of the night within well-insulated stucco constructs.

 

On the first morning after being thrown out of the detention center, she stumbled (Was shown? Led to? Did it matter?) the local equivalent of Tokyo Center for the Homeless. The building, sandy in color and sanded by desert wind, stood at the back end of the village, with its back against the mountainside. Somber and burdened by the invisible weight of the combined destitution of all its denizens. Amidst the undulating crowd of unwashed and hungry strangers, she found her first home in this world.

 

Like its counterpart back in her hometown of Tokyo, this one also took in the lost, the lonely, and the destitute, all of which she fit to a tee. They took her to the back where a thickset madame sat filing enormous piles of documents, took the papers the detention center issued to her and proceeded to—she guessed—legalize her status as a village vagabond.

 

In the tail end of the building, behind a set of reinforced steel grates, they distributed food once per day to the clawing mass on the other side. Nothing green and nothing fresh either. Not in this place. Not this deep in the desert. The homeless all feasted upon shapeless morsels of dried… something…

 

In return for the food and the occasional spare patch of clean floor inside the center’s cool confines to sleep upon, they each contributed a little something—whether it be small labors here and there, a helping hand presented to faces new and old, or the odds and ends collected from trash heaps and from the desert plains.

 

Her scars from weeks spent in the pits of the desert still fresh, Kagome stayed inside the walls of the village. While it had no doubt saved her life, the couple days in the hospital hadn’t done a lot of good for her scalded feet and emaciated physics. She was too weak for any heavy labour and too lacking in the know-how to be trusted with any complicated works.

 

Still, there were things even a frail, foreign girl who spoke not a word of the local language could handle. In the afternoon, once every day, they put her to the serving station on the safe side of the grates that stood between the center handlers and the starving mass, and when the trails of hungries trickled to an end, it was to the landfill she went.

 

Wastelands for those who lived in the desert did not strictly follow the same definition as wastelands elsewhere. Here, where nature was harsh and its bounties in scarce supply, the mantra to living a good life is waste not want not. It was upon this same principle that the villagers of Sunagakure (she only got to know this name on the third week of her residency in the Center for the Homeless) founded and operated the single landfill of the entire village.

 

Rather than a place in which people dumped things they no longer wanted nor needed, Suna Central Landfill was more of a… through station. Early in the morning, shipments of trash, usually from houses of nobility or from nearby well-to-do civilian outposts, would come through the gate in tsunamic waves. They gave it an hour to sit and set and then the trash diggers came through in trickles. She was one of them, working her shift from late afternoon to early evening.

 

There were a lot of things to be found and used. Broken furnitures. Torn, and in some cases blood stained, garments. Old and rusty weapons, to be boiled down and remade into work tools. Spoiled food. Not safe enough for human consumption but great for other uses. Though food in general was rare, especially so in this land where hardship and the lack of everything, human sustenance included, was so easily found. It didn’t take complete understanding of the language for her to see the village had fallen on hard times long ago, and there it had stayed—probably for longer than it should have.

 

The work was tedious in its simplicity. Single-minded repetitions in the thousands, in the hundred thousands. But as she was, Kagome welcomed its tediousness with open arms. It gave her purpose, filled in the empty space in her chest.

 

She couldn’t quite remember how long she spent foraging the ebbs and flows of the trash mountain, but one day a little something changed.

 

In the cracks between cliffs of trash, she found a seed.

 

A single, shrivelled, dried up and quite obviously dead germ of lemon verbena.

 

Lemon Verbena, or lemon beebrush. Versatile plant. It had pretty flowers, can be eaten, its leaves and tops had medicinal uses. Its oil was also cultivated for various purposes. But…

 

… what was the seed of a moderate climate shrub tree doing here? In a desert of all places? Not even taking into account the dreadful soil condition of this land—as sensitive to extreme weather conditions as it was—this would be the last place she expected to find a seed of its kind.

 

Sunagakure was infamous as a land mostly incapable of carrying any life forms, except for humans and their assorted pets, to terms. Water was scarce and the seeds of the rare plant life capable of surviving and bearing fruits, in its various meanings and interpretations, to maturity even rarer. A seed… of anything at all… should not even be here, in the place where discarded things gathered, in the first place. Dead or not.

 

In the end though, there really was no point in wondering about the hows, the whys, and the ifs. It was there and she found it. Simple as that.

 

The events that followed mirrored Kagome’s discovery of the lemon verbena seed in their simplicity and natural order of escalation. The effects of such events however, were anything but simple.

 

She came home when the sun went down. Putting her bag of finds of the day in the assigned slot, she made a beeline for the children chamber. When she came in, the children twittered in joy and excitement. They wrapped around her, chirping in the language universal to all the children in all the worlds, undeterred by the scents of garbage, sweat and toil emanating from her hair, her clothes, her body.

 

She sang along too. Meaningless words that partook in their childish happiness and chased away her own heartache. Then she took out the dead seed and made a wordless gesture of ‘Look what I have for you here!’

 

At once, they gathered around her, eyes wide and open mouth.

 

The seed of the lemon verbena lay in the palm of her grubby hand, tiny and black and lifeless. Then Kagome reached deep inside her, deeper and deeper until she touched upon the wellspring of strength that had always been with her, even in death. It came to her readily, easily, like a pet welcoming the return of its owner after a long absence. The rush of its power was heady, but she steadied her heart and focused upon the seed.

 

The most basic of a Miko’s power. To heal. Brought to the next level. She can feel the soul of the seed, not dead, never dead, because souls never truly died, but dormant. She reached out, touched it, coaxed it slowly out of its slumber.

 

Before the wide eyes of the children, the seed stirred. Its coarse, black shell broke and from within the crack, a tiny green sprout appeared. It did not stop there however. The sprout grew, sprang one leaf, two, lengthened and branched off, until all of a sudden it was not a single seed in her hand but a rapidly growing plant.

 

The children oohed and ahhed but she put her free hand in front of her mouth in a silencing gesture. Then she stood up and led them out to the back door where there was a patch of earth between the door and the barbwire fence. Stepping out on the cold, cracked earth, she lowered herself on one knee.

 

The plant in her hand had grown a headful of leaves, then buds started springing from the tips of its soft, green branches. She dug a hole in the hard, barren dirt, lowered the root of the tree into it, filled up the hole, then she stood up and watched as the last of her power inside the lemon verbena sapling bloomed into beautiful, luminous purple and white flowers.

 

She allowed herself a moment, savoring the sudden but much treasured moment of beauty. Surely this was a miracle. In a place such as this where new life more often than not was snuffed out before it could truly bloom. Out of all the foragers digging through the vast expanse of garbage in the landfill, it was she that happened upon that single dead seed.

 

She looked to the children and drank in the expressions of pure wonder that lit up their faces. The sweetness of their innocence filled her heart. Long ago, before she had landed in this strange, new world, she had made a promise to a certain someone to never use her power for the sake of herself, not even when her life was at stake… especially when her life was at stake.

 

But here, now, in this village where blood mingled in the sand and the land itself soaked in sorrow, these orphaned children deserved a little miracle to brighten their day.

 

* * *

 

 

Of course, this was how they discovered her power. The ninja and their Kazekage, the entire village, and then, eventually, the entire ninja world.

 

But not all at first of course, and not so quickly. In a land where ordinary humans were capable of feats she had only previously seen in great and powerful demons, a little lemon tree growing over night in the backyard of the State-funded Home for the Poor and the Lost can be easy to overlook.

 

Gradually though, words started to spread. Children had no concept of secrets... and possessed an endless willingness to share their wonder. Before long, she found herself pulled to aside by the Chief of the Center and the single medic unfortunate enough to pick the draw for monthly vagabond duty.

 

There were a lot of words exchanged, the majority of which flew right over her head, and a lot of wild gestures, pointing at her, then at the sapling they had uprooted and put in a bowl (still green and vibrant with life, even when it was no longer feeding on her spiritual power, despite the hard, black soil encasing its roots), then right back at her.

 

“Nan Chakra nai.” Said the chief, wagging his finger in her direction. She understood it a little. It meant ‘no’. Out of all the languages in the world, yes and no were always the first two words picked up by all new learners, closely followed by ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’, ‘I love you’, and ‘where’s the toilet?’. But no what? No chakra? What was chakra? And what did it have to do with her?   

 

The medic shrugged and uttered two words. “Kekkai Genkai.” Followed by a string of incomprehensible sounds that, when combined, gave the impression of ‘I’ve seen weirder things. What are you getting your feathers all ruffled for?’

 

Somewhere in the tail end of their conversation, they turned their gazes on her and she felt a shift… a sudden spike in awareness to the atmosphere. It was as if all of a sudden they were seeing her, really her, Kagome Higurashi of the Shikon no Tama, for the first time and not the frail, foreign, and aimless girl she had been these past weeks.

 

Warily, the medic growled. “Kazekage-sama…” His voice dropped an octave, growing hard and cold as steel all of a sudden.

 

“Nan chakra nai.” The Center Chief repeated, softly and almost warily this time, and as he spoke, his gaze turned from her to the medic, who, in reply, snapped his attention back to his counterpart and let loose a string of hisses, sharp gaze flying between her and the Chief.

 

“Nan chakra nai.” Repeated the Chief, his hands held in a placating gesture, and more and more his voice grew soft and slow, and then finally he put one hand in his pocket only to withdraw from it a single brown grain.

 

Rice. She would recognize it anyday. In his hand, the Chief held a single, full-germ rice grain. It was black and brown with disease and, like its predecessor the lemon verbena seed, had rotted to death a long time ago.

 

Gently, he took her hand, put the grain on her palm, and folded her fingers shut around it.

 

“Ueru.” He commanded. The tension creased the corner of his eyes.

 

Realization came to Kagome like a lightning bolt. Of course, they wanted to make use of her power, wanted to test her, to see what she can do. The look on their faces was that of children eagerly looking forward to trying out a new toy.

 

Something rose in her chest. Not bitterness, but an overwhelming melancholy and a hint of trepidation. The power within her should never be used for the selfish gains of others. She had learned this lesson the hard way.  

 

She pushed the Chief’s hand back, returning the rice grain to him. Eyeing the medic in defiance, she showed him her bare throat.

 

“If it is death you wish to inflict upon me.” She said in her own language. Only the second time ever that she attempted conversation since entering this world. “Then do to me as you wish. I am not afraid of you.”

 

Her intent must have translated across languages… or at least showed in the tone of her voice and the nuances of her gestures, because right afterwards there was a hush. She saw the medic narrowing his eyes, his hands straying to his belt where rows of steel senbon the length of a full finger hung.

 

Before the medic made a move however, the Chief of the Homeless Center stopped him cold with one raised hand.

 

“Nan Chakra Nai.” He repeated for a fourth time to his fellow villager, patient and soft, but unyielding.

 

For a second time, he forced the dead rice grain into her hand. This time however, he didn’t stop here. His hand came to her face, gripped her chin. He steered her towards the open window through which she could see the afternoon sea of hungry vagabonds.

 

They were filthy, as usual, and hungry. They raised their arms and clamored in front of the steel grates where public welfare staff handed out dried, tasteless rations in snatches. A veritable sea of clawing hands and faces mad and naked with hunger. In the midst of this sea, she saw the children for whom she made the lemon flower bloom.

 

There was a sound to her ears. A word uttered with such sincerity she didn’t need to know the language to understand what it meant.

 

“Please.” Said the Chief of the Sunagakure Center for the Homeless. She saw then that she had been wrong about him. With her head still faced away from the duo and for the second time since coming to this world, she reached deep inside for that shimmering wellspring within her and withdrew from it a breath, a light.

 

In her hand, the rice grain grew warmer, and warmer, and in a sudden spurt, burst forth from within her tightly clenched fist. When she turned back, what she now held in one hand was a single stalk of rice, gold and gleaming with promises in the reflected afternoon sun, its branches laden with new grains.

 

The medic and the chief eyed her speechlessly as they contemplated the ramifications of what they had just witnessed. That was no Mokuton jutsu as they had hypothesized before coming here. No. This was something more than that. A miracle surely. Because in all the history of Sunagakure and all the history of the entire ninja world, not even the most powerful of them could breathe life—true life and not the twisted imitation of it—into things already dead, not unless they paid the price with their own.

 

Not unless they were the Sage of Six Paths himself.  

 

* * *

 

 

**End Chapter 1**

* * *

 

 


	2. Of Gold and Fools

Disclaimer: I do not own anything from Inuyasha nor Naruto. The only thing I own is the plot.

Beta: Michelle T.

**Chapter 2:** **Of Gold and Fools**

" _What glitters may not be gold; and even wolves may smile; and fools will be led by promises to their deaths."_

\- Lauren Oliver -

* * *

He watched the girl through the one-way glass pane on the wall. She sat beside the barred windows, looking down on the humming village below. Sunlight streamed on her face, drawing curves of shadows and light on the incredibly young visage.

She couldn't have been more than eighteen, he thought. A child, only just starting to bud into something more. There were secret places still on the planes of her face, and its softness was at once repulsive and inviting to him .

"Yondaime Kazekage-sama." Someone called. He didn't need to turn around to know who it was from the sheer tone alone. There was always a definite lack of respect for his official title in Chiyo of the Gokyodai's voice. Just as well since the retired counselor was already his great grand mother's age and had seen him since he was a snot-nosed genin. He supposed it was difficult to allocate the appropriate reverence to one who would always be a little kid in her eyes.

"Is that the one?"

He nodded imperceptibly, eyes still focused on the girl on the other side of the glass pane. She dangled her legs from the edge of the chair, swinging them idly back and forth, her toes ghosting over the floor. The action made her appear even younger, almost childish.

The shinobi in him disapproved. He had many soldiers of the same age, kunoichi who faced twice the dangers their shinobi comrades did on the burden of their gender alone. In the world of ninja, such… innocence… invited disasters.

"Doesn't look like much," commented Chiyo.

"They never do," he said in reply as he turned away and faced Chiyo in full. " Kekkei Genkai are naturally deceiving in appearance. It's the quiet ones, the least visible ones that are always the most dangerous. A little child may pose the greatest threat. The burliest brute may be the most brittle link of a chain. Such differences are difficult to tell, but they are the ones that decide who will come out the victors on the battlefield. Has the council come to a decision?"

"Maybe… when I'm finally dead," was the answer. "Those bickering idiots always like to draw out on decisions too big for them to handle." Then she turned on him. "What are you doing waiting for them to make your decision for you? Are you not Kazekage, brat? I hope I do not need to tell you the true worth of this girl's power."

The true worth of her power? He glanced at the girl on the side of the glass pane. Yes. That was something he also wanted to know.

"That is… if the reports on what she can do hold true." He said simply.

_Mumei, Nameless, because even now we do not know what is her real name_. He thought to himself, silently going over what little they had managed to glean off the records and the people who had been spending time with the girl. _Discovered at the village gate exactly 59 days prior. At first we assumed her to be one of our lost citizens or a merchant who got lost on the Desert routes. She was taken in and given the requisite treatment for desert-stranded subjects, as per the village policy. Once her records and fingerprints were checked against the archives however, it turned out that she was not one of ours. She had no documents nor traces on her person indicative of her origin and even interrogation and surface mind probes yielded nothing as she did not speak our language._

That was the first anomaly. All five of the great nations and even smaller nations within the cluster of continents known to this day spoke the same language. There were records of a time long past when people of different countries spoke different languages but the timeline must have been eons in the past. And in any case, to this day, such records were still considered myths at best.

Then came the second anomaly. _When checked with border patrol teams, we found no reports nor sightings of any entrants passed the border even resembling the subject_. Due to the open nature of the border surrounding Kaze no Kuni as well as the vast desert that made up the bulk of the nation terrain, border patrol teams all had at least one sensor in their roster and, when combined, the number and range of the sensors should always cover the entirety of the borderline, ensuring that the teams would always get prior notice on any unreported entries. Even in the case that someone… or something managed to slip past the patrol perimeter, they would have been discovered at one among the many mountain pass choke points surrounding the village. The fact that even the teams at these choke points couldn't pick up on her presence until Mumei was right in front of the village gate can only mean that…

_She had no chakra…_

Which would explain why she was able to slip past the net so easily as well as the leniency of the interrogation team. Without a full scan, they had thought her chakra only abnormally low and categorized her as a harmless civilian and not a potential spy sent by a rival village.

Then the third, final, and greatest anomaly of all. The girl's Kekkei Genkai.

Discovered by the staffs of the village Public Welfare Center approximately one week ago, the power to, as it appeared on the surface, induce growth in all plant life… even beyond death. Under this yet nameless Kekkei Genkai, a single plant life went from seed stage, through germination, growth, full maturity, into harvestable age within mere seconds. Types or species of the specific plant made no difference. Plants with life cycles spanning decades grew in the same amount of time as those that completed their life cycle within days.

"You are thinking too much." Chiyo cut his thoughts in the middle. "It's the downfall of us thinker types. We like to tinker too much with the theoretical side of jutsu creation and development." She said, referring to their roles as spearheads in Sunagakure jutsu R&D operations. Then she paused, casting a considering look at the still unaware girl. "Though I must admit, it is a most interesting Kekkei Genkai the likes of which I have never seen before. I can barely understand the mechanics of its function as it is. It is so easy to mistake it for the Mokuton Kekkei Genkai… but while there are similarities between the two, calling them the same would be an amateur's mistake and I would loath to make that kind of mistakes at my age." She put on gnarled finger and tapped against the glass pane. "The simplest way to describe it…"

She stopped again as she weighed her words.

"... is that it is an ability that negates all effects of the natural world upon a single plant-based organism and reroutes all its natural needs for sustenance to the source of Mumei's power."

"In other words…" He cut in, "the instance the ability is activated, the Kekkei Genkai user effectively becomes the earth, the air, the water, and the sun for the subject which she casted her power upon. Once it is activated, she becomes the sustenance and the sole source of life for that single subject. It is the power… of a tyrant… regardless of how benevolent it appears to be. " He left off there, not mentioning the fact that they had no idea whether this ability only worked on plant life… or more…

_If she can activate her power on a non-botanical lifeform… say…. a human, such ability then, regardless of its owner's lack of physical strength would make her a force to be reckoned with indeed._

Chiyo laughed, suddenly and loudly. "I suppose that is another way to describe it. Such grand words for something we know so little of… but… skepticism is a good trait for a Kazekage…"

"Assume all cautions when dealing with unknown abilities, presume nothing and leave nothing unquestioned. That has always been the policy of the jutsu R&D department… which you yourself laid the foundation of."

"That is true," the old poison master acquiesced… before getting off on another tangent. "The illogical idiosyncrasy of this Kekkei Genkai is the same as the Mokuton."

He tilted his head an almost imperceptible millimeter towards her, indicating his interest in Chiyo's personal observation of Mumei's Kekkei Genkai.

"Konoha teaches its children that the Mokuton is a combination of Earth and Water release brought to the next level. But this teaching is just that—children's tales woven to mystify and deify a power that should by all rights be brought onto the examination table and dissected for its irregularities. Anyone with a brain will see that when mixed together, water and earth would only create mud and not plant life. If only water and earth were sufficient to forest an entire country, we of the desert would have done the same to restore the fertility of our own soil long ago. The combination of only water and earth alone aren't enough to create the element known as wood. From this simple observation alone, there _**must**_ be a third secret element involved."

He nodded, crossing his arms. He had thought the same despite never having shared his personal observation.

"Of course, there are various examples of advanced Kekkei Tota that combine three elements into one unique release, the Jiton release possessed by not one but two generations of Tsuchikage is a prime example, so this should come as no surprise to any jutsu masters with eyes to see and a brain between their ears. What is special about the Mokuton… is that unlike the Jiton which combines earth, wind, and fire, this third release is not an elemental release at all but is something that is unique to the Senju bloodline.

" _The third release is… a life release."_

Also correct. He nodded again, unfazed by Chiyo's revelation.

"Out of all Release type Kekkei Genkai, the Mokuton is unique in that it is the only release that deals with 'living matters'. Traditionally, release type Kekkei Genkai are manifestations of natural forces and phenomenons. Fire, earth, wind, water. None of these things carry life in and of themselves. Even advanced release Kekkei Genkai and Kekkei Tota are no exception to this one principal. The Mokuton, the Kekkei Genkai that releases the element of wood, living, breathing organism in themselves and not a force of nature, is the sole exception to this rule… up until now."

"Therefore, it is not unfair… to assume that this secret third element possessed by those of Senju blood is the key that grants the spark of life to the Mokuton." He finished Chiyo's statement, having come to the same conclusion as hers long ago.

"The mythical Sage arts possessed by only a rare handful of individuals within our world at any one time. Mokuton Hashirama Senju… was one such individual." Chiyo continued. "It is said that the key to mastering this art and by extension a higher form of chakra called Senchakra is to train one's body and mind until the point where one can touch, withstand, draw upon, and control the life energy of the natural world itself. This correlates with our theory that the Mokuton is a Kekkei Tota that combines not only earth and water but also the element of life energy taken from nature to create the living element of wood."

That went without saying.

"Based on the similarities we have observed so far between the Mokuton and this girl's Nameless Kekkei Genkai, I think it is safe to assume that they run on the same fuel. The element of life that can only the Sages can perceive. The key to their life-giving property must be this mythical life force of the natural world. That also explains why our sensors couldn't get a read even when she was using her power right in front of them… simply because they cannot perceive it."

"It is," he agreed.

"However, even the Mokuton has its limitations. Both of these Kekkei Genkai may have various similarities but there are several key differences. One…"

Chiyo held up one gnarled finger.

"Mokuton jutsus still need chakra to fuel their power. This girl has none. In the last week, even with the enormous number of plant life, crops and trees she had fostered, she had never once shown signs of fatigue due to the use of her power. Two…"

Came the second finger.

"The Mokuton requires acute understanding of chakra pathways, jutsu theories, and elaborate hand seals to execute jutsus of higher power and complexity levels. In so far, we have observed nothing of the sorts from Mumei. She has no chakra pathways, as impossible as that is, and the requirements for her to activate her power on anything seem to consist of mere physical touch and her own will. Three…"

She held three fingers in the air, drawing circular motions on the glass pane with them. There was a light to her eyes that he hadn't seen in a long time. Anticipation. Amusement. A quiet delight that hid something fierce underneath. The last time he had seen Chiyo of the Gokyoudai like this... that was back when he was a little genin kid who didn't know his own limitation and on sheer ignorance, made the mistake of challenging her to a ninja kumite to prove his 'worthiness as the future Kazekage'.

"The Mokuton is mostly limited to wood. There are accounts of the rare Mokuton users exerting their power on other plant life - shrubs, flowers, weeds and vines - but with these plants, the effect of their power are incredibly limited. We have never heard of Hashirama Senju himself resurrecting an entire field of dead crops and while he was alive he was the force behind Hi no Kuni thriving forestry and wood trade. Agriculture and other food related industries were chaperoned by the Akimichi instead. Historical documents also accounted for several crop failure seasons during Shodaime Hokage's reign, causing fluctuations and, in one case, a war-time food crisis. All of this should never have happened if Shodaime Hokage indeed had the power to resurrect and fuel the growth of _**any**_ plant life such as Mumei demonstrated."

"And… last but not least." Said Chiyo, her attention fully focused upon the subject of their discussion. "The Mokuton does not posses the power to negate the effects of external factors such as sustenance, soil condition, or even the weather upon the trees it creates or nurtures… not pass the limits of the jutsu caster's chakra reservoir anyway. Among the countless trees created by Shodaime Hokage, only those that were planted upon fertile ground, i.e. that within the territory of Hi no Kuni itself, still survive to this day. Those that were created during his battles in other countries, over barren land or under harsh conditions not suitable for their species, ended up withering away the moment the chakra powering them ran out. As we have seen… this is not the case with Mumei's power. Even planted in barren soil and left out to harsh desert conditions, Mumei's plants thrive."

There was a hint of wonder and exasperation in her voice, as if she was annoyed at the fact that she couldn't quite explain the mechanics behind the nameless Kekkei Genkai. "It can be that we merely haven't found the limits to her power yet. Perhaps if the plants are far enough away from her or enough time has passed for whatever it is that nurtures them to run out… but in so far, the conditions with which we have tested her power have already far outstripped those of the Mokuton."

"From these observations alone…" She concluded. "... it is clear that we are dealing with a vastly superior Kekkei Genkai than the Mokuton possessed by the very founder of Konohagakure."

"... you don't sound particularly pleased about that." He said after a full minute of silence from the usually verbose master of puppetry. He knew what she must be thinking and was goading her into admitting the same.

"... Despite scolding you for overthinking things, I ended up prattling on and on." She said finally, smiling in self-depreciating humor.

"I do not mind. Even the prattling of one of the Gokyoudai is filled with wisdom."

"How cute." Chiyo gave a bark of laughter. "If you used that tongue on the council, they may be more open to going your way once in a while." Then she went quiet for a minute before continuing.

"We sure talked a lot without even looking at that little girl face to face. This is proof that we, you and I, members of the most influential and most powerful group of this entire village, are actually afraid."

He said nothing to Chiyo's statement, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with her.

"The truth of the matter is, we are scared of her power. Any fools would take her Kekkei Genkai at face value and not understand the true ramification of its potentials. But we… because we can comprehend the intricacies behind such deceptively simple ability, that we are… actually… afraid of what we may find. The fact that you are standing here behind the wall of this room, behind all these containment seals..."

She made a gesture, pointing at the seal-laden wall before them.

"... is testament to your fear."

"...I prefer to call it being well prepared." He replied, matter-of-factly.

"Preparation hmm?" Chiyo countered. "I suppose that is true enough. But the fact that you have plastered the same jutsu negation seals on your body means that you intend to face the girl by yourself soon. You want to find things out and speak to her face to face, a task which may be carried out by any of our top rank interrogators. There really is no need for the Kazekage himself to undertake this, even less when the subject concerned is both a foreigner and the possessor of a Kekkei Genkai whose true power remains an unknown. It is simply too dangerous for the leader of the village to even be in the same room with such unknown quality… that is… unless there is something to be gained well worth the risk to the Kazekage himself as well as the village."

Correct again. Truly even in their old age, few things escaped the Gokyoudai's eyes.

"The fact that you plan to undertake this task by yourself… and most likely… yourself alone without even a single assistant..." She said, drawing her words out slowly, each with careful consideration. "... must mean that whatever it is you want to find out… or to do… you would like to keep well-guarded only to yourself and probably a few of the top ranking councilors. This need for secrecy must mean that… you have come to the same conclusion as I have about the source of this girl's power… and you do not want this information, if you ever manage to confirm it, to be spread out beyond your control. And… that is why you will not let anyone else handle Mumei but yourself. Am I correct?"

He went quiet for a while, before finally speaking up.

"In… the mere span of a week, and supplied with only a basket of dead seeds, a single person, this Mumei, was able to create enough food to feed our entire village for a year and… she did this without ever showing signs of taxing on herself, without disrupting her daily life and works." He can feel the old bitterness creeping up in his guts.

"I do not need to tell you what this means to a village such as ours. This single ability to create massive amount of food in so little time probably won't mean much to the other four great villages. However, for us desert dwelling folks alone… it would mean our life or death."

The desert that gave them their name. The desert that harbored them and protected them from invasion and hostile forces. The desert that bore them in its bosom, that forged them and made them in its image. They said desert dwelling folks, ninja of the Sand, were a hardy people who thrived even in the most unforgiving of environments, that a Suna nin would make success out of failure even at the cost of his life, regardless of the odds against him, that Suna nins just didn't know when to quit.

This was all true.

However, as much as the desert that made their home was their pride, it was also their bane. Despite what a lot of young blood ninja would like to think, a ninja village cannot be carried on by the trade of killing alone. In the first Kage summit held by the Shodai of all five great nations, the founding Kazekage himself acknowledged this fact by demanding compensation for Sunagakure not in the form of money, bloodline, or weapons, but in the form of fertile land capable of bearing and sustaining life.

This barren homeland, this bane that they would never be able to escape, over the years had proven to be extremely costly on the business of running a ninja village.

For every ninja Suna produced, it had to pay triple, sometimes quadruple the cost other villages did. Necessities other villages took for granted had to be imported at cut-throat prices from other countries. Food had to be bought from the neighboring Ta no Kuni. Water had to be tubed underground from Amegakure. Other necessities were also no exception. This land simply had next to no production value and simply could not compete with other nations. Even gold trading afforded by his own Gold Dust release could barely hold the economy together.

It was for this simple reason that Sunagakure had always had to fight for its existence and its fragile economy from the day of its creation.

And now… literally from nowhere this little slip of a girl appeared and she alone possessed the single Kekkei Genkai capable of erasing the unfair disadvantage that had dogged the village from its founding days, effectively reversing a situation that had persisted for more than a hundred years.

"She is…" he started, "... or will become… incredibly valuable to us very soon. Those very same councilors that are arguing about what to do with her will soon see the worth of Mumei's power… just as you and I did." He didn't stop there. "They will then go one more step. Blinded by the benefits created by her power, they will not see beneath Mumei's power. They will not be able to comprehend the true depth of what she is capable of."

"Oh ho… by those words I suppose you have your own guesses on what this Kekkei Genkai really is. Let's hear it then."

He paused momentarily, carefully weighing his words. "I believe that despite all our reasoning and hypotheses, we are both wrong about the true nature of Mumei's power." He said finally. His words immediately silence Chiyo.

"The only reason we are even discussing the mechanics of something that has so far defied all known rules of shinobi arts and blood limits, is because of its similarity with Shodaime Hokage's Mokuton. In the face of something so foreign… so bizarre that it is almost impossible to grasp… of course we latched onto the single familiarity we can see… which is its effect upon plant life. Howover, the truth of the matter is that we know too little for any of our theories to actually hold a modicum of truth in them."

His eyes were riveted onto the girl on the other side of the glass pane.

"Why is it that she is alive in the first place? A person who has no chakra and no pathways in their body should not even be able to live. Even the weakest of civilians have rudimentary pathways imbedded in their bodies. Even shinobis with crippled chakra systems, such as the Leaf's Green Beast, have _some_ amount of chakra in their bodies. Even newborns possess the blueprint of chakra pathways that will grow and mature with time. But Mumei… simply has none. She is a ghost to our senses, but she is also flesh and blood. Her mere existence defies our natural laws."

He touched the part of his chest right under the collarbone where the tip of a seal was visible.

"For all I know, these may be useless against her, but because I simply do not know for sure, this is the best I can come up with. What is it that she uses to fuel her ability? Is it truly this mythical life force of the world that only the Sages are capable of perceiving? But… we all know that Sage training takes decades to master even for the luminaries of our world... and we have all heard of the countless failures that ended in death. I have also heard rumors of a clan in a nameless country capable of passively absorbing the energy in the environment around them. This ability however, seems to force them into uncontrollable blood rages at times during which they can kill countless of their own clansmen. From these accounts, we can see that life energy is not the harmless and benevolent force of life as its name may suggest. In fact, from all existing records, it appears to be an incredibly chaotic and destructive force. To be honest, we should not even be surprised. After all, we of the desert know better than anyone that nature is an unforgiving mistress. Why then should her life blood be any less ferocious?"

He paused, watching Chiyo's face from the corner of his eyes. No surprise as far as he can see. Jutsu developers really did think alike.

"But if that is the case… then… what is it that enables Mumei to harness such volatile force of nature? What stops her from being consumed by the source of her power itself? Are we to believe this is also part of her Kekkei Genkai? Is that why she is still alive despite not having chakra in her body? Because this mysterious life energy effectively replaces chakra for her? A naturally occurring savant who lives off of the most dangerous kind of energy in the ninja world… if that is the truth… then there is no way what we have seen is the full extent of her powers…The very foundation is already vastly different from our own. I believe… that we have both been wrong and that Mumei's nameless Kekkei Genkai is something else entirely and not what it appears to be."

That thought… filled him with trepidation.

"Of course, the council will not see it as such," said Chiyo, continuing his line of reasoning. "Once the effect of her plant growth inducing power finally sinks in, they will be too afraid of losing what is right in front of their eyes to experiment and find out the truth. By that time, our own village, our own people will have already become wholly dependant on the ' _ **sustenance**_ ' she provides."

She stopped there, eyes widened as if she had just realized something, then laughed .

"A tyrant of life indeed," said Chiyo finally. "Though I suppose that is why you will let no one else but yourself handle her. You would like to affirm her worth and… depending on what you see in that little girl… decide to either destroy her before her tyrant's power can take root or shackles her to our village and force her to live the rest of her life for the good of Sunagakure."

He said nothing in response, simply put his hand on the door.

_This bloodline,_ he thought, _is too useful to go to waste. In the desert where things are scarce, any and everything serves a purpose. Mumei is no different. Even if her power proves too volatile, he will not kill her._

The seals reacted to his chakra and together, slowly at first, then faster, they moved, whirled.

The ninja world was no stranger to the many ways with which to forcefully extract a valuable bloodline limit from its original owner. The fact that Mumei was a girl of malleable, fertile age and a lone foreigner in a land as alien to her as she was to it only gave him more options with which to choose from. The thought left a sour note in his mind, after all he himself had a daughter near her age, but he had done worse things for his village… in the name of his village. The suffering of one person could never amount to the suffering of an entire people. The happiness of one person could never compare to the happiness of an entire nation.

This was but a trifle in the grand scheme of things.

With little click-clacks, one by one, the containment seals engraved into the door untangled themselves, unlocking the many layers of stone gates that led to the chamber where Mumei was kept.

He gazed inside and saw her looking back.

* * *

**End Chapter 2**

 

1\. This story will be romance. Any guesses?

2\. Don't jump to conclusions. Any readers who are familiar with my work will know that I love nothing more than screwing with my reader's head (Nope! Not sorry!)

3\. I also hate simpleton characterization or one-dimensional characters. People that you think will be the villains maybe something else entirely and people who you think you can trust may end up stabbing you in the back. That said though, what do you think of the characterization of 4th Kazekage and Chiyo in this chapter (they are partly built on the info that they were both jutsu developers - Chiyo with her kinjutsu and the 4th Kazekage's creation of new jutsu being credited by one of the Suna councilor as one major factor in keeping the village economy from sinking - thus they both have very analytic and incredibly logical mindset. They are also in the position of power and under the pressure of leadership so they do not lack for ruthlessness either)

4\. Here are the ages of the people in this story since the beginning, just for reference:

Kagome: 17-18 years old

4th Kazekage (aka Gaara's dad): 38 years old (In Canon, he died around 40 years old)

Gaara: 10 years old

Kankuro: 12-13 years old

Temari: 13-14 years old

Naruto (and his year mates): 10 years old

Chiyo: 67-68 years old (still advising during 4th Kazekage's reign as stated in canon through the resurrected Kazekage's flashback)

That should also give you an idea on the timeline we will work with. Kagome's presence in Suna will, of course, has an impact on the ninja world, the first of which is the strengthening of Suna (since she alone can pretty much feed the entire village with almost zero cost), thus making them less desperate and a lot less likely to enter into a risky alliance with Orochimaru.

**Author's Note:**

> 1/ When Kagome wet her facemask with a handful of water in the beginning of the chapter: this is actually a real life desert survival technique. By wetting her face mask and wearing it, she prevents her body moisture from escaping through her nose and mouth and delay dehydration which is the number one cause of death for people who get lost in the desert.  
> 2/ Not a lot of dialogues in this chapter. This is intentional and is designed to create a sense of mental isolation, mirroring Kagome’s state of mind (lost in a strange new world, alone and unable to communicate). This will gradually change in subsequent chapters as Kagome learns the language bit by bit and the story ventures into the POV of other characters (the 4th Kazekage for example, etc…)  
> 3/ This story is basically my attempt to write a character that is strong without being a fighter, who forces change without the use of violence and who, by surrendering, actually wins the war. I have grown bored with the usual power trip protagonist type and is trying out new things. Maybe it will work. Maybe it won’t. In the end, I simply want to have fun and enjoy what I write.  
> 4/ There’s going to be a lot of world building for Suna and the ninja world, politics, and characterization (my kink, baby!!!) in this story. And romance! Can’t forget that. But it’s not going to be the way most people expect it


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